Latino groups denounce laws making it harder to help voters with disabilities and language issues

Laws in three states have enacted tougher restrictions for people who help voters with disabilities, language or other issues cast their ballots. Latino groups who have sued Texas, Arkansas and Missouri over these laws are warning that those who need help to vote in November’s elections may not get the assistance they need.  

“Many Latino voters have disabilities or English is not their first language. They also don’t know how to use the voting computers and get very nervous, so they ask for someone to help them validate their vote,” said Tania Chavez Camacho, executive director of the Texas-based nonprofit community organization La Unión del Pueblo Entero, known as LUPE.  

“But now the state requires that if you want to help a voter, you have to take an oath that says that if you violate the rules, you could be criminalized: That affects volunteers. In the end, some people don’t vote because of these obstacles,” Chavez Camacho said, referring to Texas law SB 1, which went into effect in 2021.

Under the law, assistants must fill out new paperwork disclosing their relationship to the voter and take an oath to limit their help as well as declare they didn’t “pressure or coerce” the voter into choosing them as an assistant. The oath is made under penalty of perjury, a state felony that carries jail time.

Under the Voting Rights Act, voters who need assistance because they are blind, disabled, or unable to read or write may receive assistance at the polls. But volunteers in Texas say SB 1 is making it difficult to provide that assistance.

“Sometimes we are afraid to help people who ask for assistance to accompany them to vote. Because you have to take the oath and it says that if you make a mistake, the vote won’t count and you can even go to jail. So that is very intimidating for me,” María Cristela Rocha, a member of LUPE, explained.

“The law does not specify exactly how the rule is violated, so if I am at the polling station helping a voter and an election worker says that I did something wrong, then now I can be criminalized just for wanting to help,” Chavez Camacho said. “For us, this is very worrying, because neither our staff nor volunteers feel comfortable helping people who want to go to the polls to vote. As an organization, this prevents us from doing our job.” 

The Brennan Center for Justice, which focuses on voting rights, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) are part of the legal team representing LUPE and other organizations in a federal lawsuit filed against Texas over the law.

‘We can no longer help people’

SB 1 could also be used to criminalize nonpartisan voter canvassing activities and severely restricts election officials by creating a new state jail offense for providing mail-in ballot applications to eligible voters who do not request them.

The lawsuit details that more than 277,000 voting-age U.S. citizens with limited English proficiency live in Texas counties that are not required to provide materials in their native language. The citizens are disproportionately Asian American and Latino, the groups that filed the lawsuit say.

The trial began last year in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, but there is still no ruling on the case.

Former Texas Secretary of State John B. Scott, current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and five other state officials are named as defendants in the lawsuit. Telemundo News requested comment from everyone named in the lawsuit but only received a response from Lisa Wise, the El Paso County elections administrator. She said in an email that she cannot comment “because this is an ongoing lawsuit.”

In court documents reviewed by Noticias Telemundo, some state officials involved in the trial expressed concern about the “vagueness” of some sections of SB 1. Also, election administrators testified that, in their experience, “no voter had been confused or unduly influenced” by community organizations.

In July 2021, Paxton wrote on X, “Election integrity measures have nothing to do with race, but have everything to do with making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

SB 1 was part of a series of Republican-sponsored bills that followed former President Donald Trump’s and other Republicans’ false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, claims that are still ongoing.

“The fact is that voter fraud is real," the bill’s author, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, said in a 2021 statement posted on the website of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group. “We value the opinion of every Texan and will defend their right to express it at the ballot box.” 

Democratic state Rep. Diego Bernal told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 2021: “In the last 17 years, 154 cases of electoral fraud have been prosecuted in Texas, out of a total of 94 million votes cast. The probability of electoral fraud in Texas is lower than that of any of us being struck by lightning.”

In the lawsuit, groups argue that the Texas law is a “reaction” to demographic changes in the electorate, citing that “it is now more racially diverse and younger than ever.” They cited official data showing that in 2020, Latino voter participation was about 56%, which meant that Hispanic votes made up more than a fifth of all votes cast in the state.

Laura MacCleery, senior policy director at UnidosUS, a national Latino civil rights organization, said that in her research she sees a correlation between the enforcement of laws like SB 1 and Hispanic demographics.

“We have to remember that the number of Latino voters who participated in 2020 was higher than the number needed to tip the presidential election results. And where there is a growing Latino population of powerful new voters and eligible citizens, we now see pressures to restrict the right to vote emerging, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” MacCleery, whose organization is not involved in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

Official figures compiled by UnidosUS show that there are 18 million Latinos registered to vote, making them the second largest group of voting-age Americans. However, there are 31.2 million Hispanics of voting age, so researchers from that organization say that “addressing the voter registration gap is a critical opportunity to achieve full Hispanic representation at the polls.”

Arkansas and Missouri also limit voter assistance

The Texas case is not unique. MALDEF has also sued Arkansas and Missouri for restricting assistance available to voters who do not speak English well or who have a disability.

“The state of Arkansas limits the number of people who can be helped to vote. A person can only assist six voters in each election; if they exceed that number, they are breaking the law and can be prosecuted,” Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, said in an interview.  

“In Missouri, the laws are stricter and say that no one can help more than one voter per election, unless they are an election judge or are helping immediate family members,” Saenz said.

Unlike Texas, the Arkansas and Missouri lawsuits were brought against older laws. In Missouri, the challenge was to a law enacted in 1977, and in Arkansas, it refers to rules implemented in the 1990s. According to data from the Pew Research Center, in Arkansas there are approximately 83,000 Latino voters who are eligible to participate in elections; in Missouri's case, it's 125,000.

“The limit is a huge barrier in Arkansas because we have almost no bilingual poll workers,” said Mireya Reith, executive director of Arkansas United, one of the advocacy organizations participating in the lawsuit. “We are one of the three states left in the United States where everything is in English, ballots are not translated. And since we can only help six people, our organization cannot serve all the Hispanic voters who need help because they don’t speak English or have a disability.”

Although in August 2022 a federal judge ruled that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act with its six-voter limit, state officials appealed the decision and it’s now in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

“Unfortunately, the judge in the Missouri case decided to wait for the Arkansas appeal to be resolved because they raise similar issues,” Saenz said. “So we are waiting to receive the 8th Circuit ruling that would influence both cases, but we will not have a decision before the elections, so Latino voters in those states will have to vote again within the limitations.”

Telemundo News requested a response from all state and local authorities named in both lawsuits. In Arkansas' case, authorized spokespersons for the secretary of state and the State Board of Election Commissioners said they cannot comment on the lawsuit while it is in the appeal process. Missouri authorities did not respond to the request.

In the Arkansas case, state officials argued at trial that the purpose of the six-voter limit is to “prevent helpers from improperly influencing voters’ decisions” at the polling place. In the absence of the six-voter limit, the officials argued, “busloads of people” could go to the polls and “receive fraudulent assistance from the same person.”

Reith, for her part, says there is no evidence of such fraud in the state and that the greatest fear of Hispanic people in Arkansas is making a mistake when voting, which is why they sometimes “prefer not to vote.”

“We were unable to meet the demand, so we are going to prioritize counties with more Latino voters, but 60% of immigrants in Arkansas live in rural communities with fewer than 8,000 people, so we will never have the capacity to reach everyone, and we want them to know that they have the right to receive assistance,” Reith said.

Meanwhile in Texas, Rocha says she’s excited because, at 62, this will be the first election she will be able to vote in since becoming a naturalized citizen.

“I became a citizen precisely because we are tired of having our rights taken away from us. We are going to continue fighting because we cannot deny people help, right?” she said.

An earlier version of this story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.